Monday, December 20, 2010

A New Day, A New Forge (JasperForge, that is)

It was July 2008 when we initially launched what is today our modern JasperForge community web site. How proud we were. Shiny new features all designed to make our community members more capable, engaged, and productive. Now, we’re just as proud of the new version of JasperForge that made its debut a few weeks ago.

How to expand on some pretty sophisticated features already delivered? Our initial Forge already sported features like JasperBabylon, the section of our site where community members can help translate and localize Jaspersoft’s core open source products – or feature voting which allows community members to help prioritize which features are the most important to add or improve next. And, we had already delivered some relatively unmatched scalability and performance, as our Forge hosts more than 180,000 registered community members who collectively log nearly 1M page views and thousands of Forum entries every month.

So, advancing our already advanced Forge platform wasn’t easy. Thanks to our colleagues at Essentia, though, we did it. And so we are now proudly live with the latest release of what may be the open source world’s most advanced individual Forge. What’s key to this new release?

Upgraded monitoring and tracking of total visitors to a project page

New project download monitoring

40+ canned reports to improve measurement of key site metrics

Mercurial support for a de-centralized, high performance version control system

Advanced search features to enable faster, more granular results

Of all the new capabilities, I may be most proud that JasperServer is now integrated within the JasperForge platform. This new Forge delivers a wide variety of Administrative reports and analyses designed to allow thorough review of the traffic and activity within the Forge community. Currently only available for Administrators, you can expect future Forge releases to expose relevant analytics to the entire Community.

In summary, I couldn’t have said it any better than Jaspersoft’s technical co-founder Giulio Toffoli:

"I'm extremely pleased to see Jaspersoft broaden JasperForge.org with a number of features that will increase productivity and ease of use. These are big benefits to community users, especially those who rely on low-cost, open source BI. The ongoing improvements to the forge tools re-enforces why Jaspersoft's user community continues to thrive and grow."

If you’ve not stopped by the new Forge, this is your formal invitation to do so. Comments and feedback encouraged.

1 comment:

I signed up for an account on jasperforge.org, and it is still listed as pending the next day. I sent in a contact request (which didn't allow comments...) and have not gotten a response. I just want to download the Eclipse version, help!